Prom 72 (5.9.12): John Adams – Nixon in China

[edashtav]

And I should have added, Ravel and Rachmaninov would have come up with much better tunes!

Seriously, though, I can't think of any serious composer in 1912 still composing (or for that matter returning to) the idioms of 1812 - however conservative in terms of 1912 that composer might have been considered as being.

Whilst I have sympathy for your view, S-A, you can't pick and choose, and you must not over-egg, or your custard pies will separate from their target.

For a start, 1987 ( the year of Nixon) is but 75 years away from 1912. Let's revisit your point ( leaving the adjective "serious" on the shelf), I would have thought that there were many composers in 1887 whose style was scarcely more advanced than some of the "avant-garde" in 1812. Two who lingered longer and firmly welded to the past were Camille Saint-Saens and Max Bruch, both actively reviving the past as late as WWI.

Secondly, there are many aspects of the amalgam that is John Adams style that date much later than your choice of the two Rs and you "best before" stamp of 1912. I think you will accept that minimalism plays a part and I certainly detect the Stravinsky from around WWII. (Before you mention it, I accept that elements of proto-minimalism may be found in Erik Satie's music (from 1912?)).

I do worry about the shelf life of John Adams' work. There is insufficient complexity, facility without sufficient discrimination, and a fierce determination "not to frighten the horses". More acute brains are growing tired of his music and his "novelty" will, I fear, rapidly wear thin even amongst his most ardent admirers. But.. for now he acts as a "Young Person's Guide to 20th Century Opera". Imbibing shandy can be a useful bridge to real ale. Adams is not the real deal: he is a synthetic, virtual reality composer.

[amateur51]

Imbibing shandy can be a useful bridge to real ale. Adams is not the real deal: he is a synthetic, virtual reality composer.

Start with Adams as a bridge to Adnams, in fact edashtav?

[heliocentric]

a fierce determination "not to frighten the horses"

Indeed. And the thing is there aren't any horses.

[jayne lee wilson]

... which begs the question, why bother with writing operas if they require you to compromise or abandon some of the fundamental aspects of a means of expression you're supposedly committed to - Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, for example, have had no truck with opera.

Why should any composer "commit" to any means of expression, if he or she feels it to be restricting? Adams was "bored with minimalism" because he had fully explored all he, personally could use in those earlier pieces like Shaker Loops - works which are already going beyond their precedents. Yet Common Tones and Harmonium are still fairly "abstract", even "pure" as classical composition. What about the notorious Grand Pianola Music? Why did it shock people so much? Because it contradicted expectations of modernism in a contemporary classical context. How can that be a bad thing? The first audiences (at a New York Contemporary Music festival) expected broadly serialist composition and were shocked out of their new complacency.

So what do you do next? You write an opera - a dormant, almost discredited form - on a modern political subject which makes a musical rapprochement with some of the greatest tonal musical languages of the past, styles which had become obscured by a modern musical hegemony. Nixon in China is a logical development for Adams, but it's also wickedly original in challenging expectation. Remember Mozart wanting to write about Figaro's bed, instead of Gods and Goddesses?

It is too easy to spot influences, echoes, quotations and techniques, more challenging to see the new musical creations as complete works - you need to hear them often and know them well, for that - but I'm still surprised that those who reject Adams seem not to hear his very distinctive musical voice, immediately identifiable in almost anything he's done, but most vivid in the 70s and 80s.

Beethoven broke out of his formal and stylistic limits with the finale of his 9th symphony - a big popular tune (!) in a multi-dimensional structure - and here it is, far too popular and still upsetting serious listeners here today.
Schoenberg couldn't have composed in his totally chromatic, pre WW1 idiom for ever - he needed more constraints, not less, hence serialism - why? To express something different and widen his range. (After a shattering war, the need for (superficial) classical forms, perhaps shoring up the fragments of culture against the political and personal ruins. But the new wine in the old bottles tries to move on).

Adams' best work - or at least his freshest - may seem to be behind him now, but for a few years he blew some smoking holes in a tired musical establishment, and his use of a tonal idiom, of simple musical building-blocks, should not deafen you to the highly original and expressive results.

Perhaps he'll give us some Late Quartets one day...

[heliocentric]

Why should any composer "commit" to any means of expression, if he or she feels it to be restricting?

"I firmly believe that the main task for all of us is to constantly prove our imagination and to explore what we do not yet know and have not yet experienced, in order to refine our perception and thus become more flexible, sensitive and intelligent human beings." (Stockhausen)

Like you I think there's a strong similarity between Adams' espousal of opera and Schoenberg's move from freely chromatic music to twelve-tone composition. (Although, looking at your post again, you seem to be saying that Adams abandoned minimal music because it was too restricting while Schoenberg abandoned free chromatic music because it wasn't restricting enough...) I don't have much more to say about Adams, but I do think an aesthetic based on restriction is, well, restricting, as we see from the generally pedestrian rhythmic and structural character of Schoenberg's later work (with some exceptions) relative to what came before. The serial composers of subsequent generations saw the techniques they were using as liberating rather than restricting; I think the much-repeated idea that art needs restriction ought to be questioned more often - it's not restriction and an a priori exclusion of possibilities it needs but concentration and focus and openness, which is what I don't hear in Adams, only a subordination of imaginative freedom to a need to identify and exploit a market niche. That's the identity of Adams' "voice" as far as I'm concerned - I'm not denying that it exists, I just don't like the way it talks its familiar sales pitch.

[Serial_Apologist]

"I firmly believe that the main task for all of us is to constantly prove our imagination and to explore what we do not yet know and have not yet experienced, in order to refine our perception and thus become more flexible, sensitive and intelligent human beings." (Stockhausen)

Like you I think there's a strong similarity between Adams' espousal of opera and Schoenberg's move from freely chromatic music to twelve-tone composition. (Although, looking at your post again, you seem to be saying that Adams abandoned minimal music because it was too restricting while Schoenberg abandoned free chromatic music because it wasn't restricting enough...) I don't have much more to say about Adams, but I do think an aesthetic based on restriction is, well, restricting, as we see from the generally pedestrian rhythmic and structural character of Schoenberg's later work (with some exceptions) relative to what came before. The serial composers of subsequent generations saw the techniques they were using as liberating rather than restricting; I think the much-repeated idea that art needs restriction ought to be questioned more often - it's not restriction and an a priori exclusion of possibilities it needs but concentration and focus and openness, which is what I don't hear in Adams, only a subordination of imaginative freedom to a need to identify and exploit a market niche. That's the identity of Adams' "voice" as far as I'm concerned - I'm not denying that it exists, I just don't like the way it talks its familiar sales pitch.

Schoenberg's later works - some of them - pedestrian rhythmically and structurally? Hmm - you'd have to cite, helio, 'cos I don't agree with you there - but otherwise, I couldn't have put what you've written here better.

[heliocentric]

Schoenberg's later works - some of them - pedestrian rhythmically and structurally? Hmm - you'd have to cite, helio, 'cos I don't agree with you there

I thought you mightn't! I find it very hard to get on with things like the Piano Concerto and Wind Quintet especially when it comes to those aspects, and to a greater or lesser extent the majority of the twelve-tone music, but on the other hand I have a lot of time for the Violin Concerto, Moses und Aron and the String Trio. There's just something about most Schoenberg's music I find difficult to make contact with, even though I have the greatest respect for him and what he was doing. (In distinction to John Adams for example.)

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Well I'll sign in as one of the admirers of this opera.

Is there any twentieth century opera that has a finer libretto? Klinghoffer, perhaps? To describe it as political is to miss (how?) the detailed character portraits, the drama, and the humour. Adams responds admirably in his music, the characterisations of Nixon and Chou En-lai being especially wonderful. This is a million miles from Broadway.

I wonder if Serial Apologist can give us examples of twentieth century opera which progressed musical thought in its harmonies, textures and rhythms?

[heliocentric]

I wonder if Serial Apologist can give us examples of twentieth century opera which progressed musical thought in its harmonies, textures and rhythms?

I don't know about SA but off the top of my head how about all the operatic works of Bartók, Berg, Janacek and indeed Schoenberg, Nono, Berio, Stockhausen, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Kagel, Birtwistle, the early expressionist operas of Hindemith, Weill/Brecht, Glass's Einstein on the Beach,, maybe Sciarrino... that's a few to be going on with.

[Serial_Apologist]

I don't know about SA but off the top of my head how about all the operatic works of Bartók, Berg, Janacek and indeed Schoenberg, Nono, Berio, Stockhausen, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Kagel, Birtwistle, the early expressionist operas of Hindemith, Weill/Brecht, Glass's Einstein on the Beach,, maybe Sciarrino... that's a few to be going on with.

Wow - thanks for saving me the trouble, heliocentric!

[aeolium]

My review is now online at Opera Britannia:

http://www.opera-britannia.com/index...iews&Itemid=16

A very fine operatic season at the Proms - let's hope for more in 2013.

Many thanks for the review, IGI. I enjoyed this performance, especially the singing of Kathleen Kim and Gerald Finley, but as it's the first time I've heard the whole opera I will try to listen to it again.

I agree about the operatic season, and also the non-operatic choral works particularly Judas Maccabeus and Howells' Hymnus Paradisi.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

I don't know about SA but off the top of my head how about all the operatic works of Bartók, Berg, Janacek and indeed Schoenberg, Nono, Berio, Stockhausen, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Kagel, Birtwistle, the early expressionist operas of Hindemith, Weill/Brecht, Glass's Einstein on the Beach,, maybe Sciarrino... that's a few to be going on with.

Smart list, but taking just the first one, in what way does Bluebeard's Castle make your case? Good opera, but how is the music progressive in terms of its rhythms or harmonic idioms (the 'measure of good opera' SA requires)? Everything in it, in those terms, had been done outside opera previously by Bartok. Same goes for the Weill, Glass, Birtwistle, Schoenberg, Janacek, and Berg operas that I know.

[Serial_Apologist]

Smart list, but taking just the first one, in what way does Bluebeard's Castle make your case? Good opera, but how is the music progressive in terms of its rhythms or harmonic idioms (the 'measure of good opera' SA requires)? Everything in it, in those terms, had been done outside opera previously by Bartok. Same goes for the Weill, Glass, Birtwistle, Schoenberg, Janacek, and Berg operas that I know.

I think helio was referring to innovation within opera, AIC.

[heliocentric]

Smart list, but taking just the first one, in what way does Bluebeard's Castle make your case? Good opera, but how is the music progressive in terms of its rhythms or harmonic idioms (the 'measure of good opera' SA requires)? Everything in it, in those terms, had been done outside opera previously by Bartok.

I can't speak for SA but I was talking about the significance of these works to the development of musical thinking in general, not just within a particular genre. On the other hand I wasn't just talking about "rhythms and harmonic idioms" but about the whole complex of structural/expressive aspects of composition, which arguably is not strictly divisible into such supposedly independent aspects, and here I think Bluebeard's Castle certainly is a progressive and innovative work - it's not just about the harmonies but the way the harmonies are inseparable from its dramatic/proportional structure. Actually I would also argue that such features as orchestration and thematic development in that work are innovative in the context of Bartók's oeuvre, although I don't know it in enough detail to give you chapter and verse.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Well in reply to both SA and helio, I really fail to see why, then, NIC fails this 'test' that has been imposed. Adams clearly has his own musical voice, and shows it to fine effect in this opera. And I'll repeat that I consider the libretto to be amongst the finest of the twentieth century.